A wise but ever struggling family friend who is overflowing with wisdom (we teach best what we need to learn) told me once that everyone is made for a certain job, "calling" or whatever it is that you want to say--I like to say "work" because I like the word and I think that work is mostly beautiful and not awful like "task" or "chore" or "job" or sterile like "occupation."
But I believed it then and sometimes I wander from it, but fate brings me back. Cliche it may seem to say, but moments and people I think act as catalysts for change, and not chaotically coincidental, for if that were so, more of us would be dead instead of that thing that happened to save us right before we made that last decision.
And those uncoincidental accidents that bring us back to remember what it was that made us fullfilled--think on your life and when you were fullfilled--if you can remember it--and think on why you aren't doing it, and also think when you are brought back to it--no coincident is that powerful to continue to remind us of what we should be other than the fact that something true and real is deeper than our reality.
I was reminded this evening that a life without christ and community is the most boring thing in the absolute world. Despite the fact that I love drinking and living in debaucherous intensity, even debauchery is boring after a while because it becomes mundane to be intense all the time. And by jesus christ, I by no means mean going to "church" or reading the bible or praying out loud on street corners or whatever it is that you judge him by. Instead I simply mean something that has depth for me in the ideas of service, grace and the constant search for truth and denial of my constant lazyness and ignorance in that. So vague I know.
But things that ring true to me cannot be explained in paragraphs nor conversations or sermons or books but instead in perhaps in things like plato's idea of forms. Things that are very real and logical but also at the same time unscientific and absolutely abstract.
This is the perfect reason why this leads to what work I have to do to live. When I was seventeen I went to a place called L'Abri and it didn't do much for me then. I was too young and self-concious and struggling to relate to group of people who were the age I am now--I was introspective, to the absolute extreme; perhaps this is a problem with monasticism? But L'Abri and the lifestyle of living communally, intellectually, and simply but not fanatically--is the closest thing to being how I think people should live that I have ever experienced. (that is why I want to go to south america and live with indigenous/native peoples because they seem to satisify many of those latter aspects of living)
So anyway. I am not going to say what I want to do because I say it all the time and it loses importance when I do. But I will do someday when I get older and have kids and horses and chickens and learn more about being satisfied.
Check these places out too, they are different and perhaps more religious than the work I want to do, but they are similar.
p.s. I still like good old debauchery. And mullets.
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